Perhaps marriage and monogamy are the problem here. It’s not that you’re committing to the wrong person (twice) it’s that you’re spending all your energy in the act of committing. Perhaps human beings would be happier if they didn’t insist on a legal focussed, obligation led, societally enforced construct as a form of maintaining their psychological balance.

My partner and I have been together 7.5 years, we have no desire to marry and no desire to live together. If we had children… we’d probably move closer to each other. This runs counter to the perceived wisdom of society and ‘how things should be’ — but then the perceived wisdom of how things should be includes tolerating years of unhappiness and allowing people to make the same declaration ’til death do us part’ multiple times.

Perhaps the fundamental problem here isn’t the list of unsexy things, maybe the core belief underpinning the process, the conventional model of commitment to which the western world subscribes, is wrong.